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by IoanNemos



Category: Portal (Video Game)
Genre: Christmas Fluff, F/M, aided and abetted by the folks in the Chelley discord server, unaffiliated post-game au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-15
Updated: 2018-12-15
Packaged: 2019-09-18 12:05:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16994688
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IoanNemos/pseuds/IoanNemos
Summary: The problem, Wheatley thought as he clung to the strange metal thing sticking out between the roof tiles, wasn’t that he was an idiot; the problem was his thinking was… oh, how had Chell put it… non-linear.





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**Author's Note:**

> I wouldn't have written this without the inspiration and encouragement of the Chelley discord. Join us! https://discord.gg/Yp7Zva3

In the quiet neighborhood, something set the neighbor’s dog off again. It didn’t take much, if the frequency of the _yap yap yap_ was any indication, and usually it didn’t bother Wheatley much: he’d just turn up his music a little if the noise was starting to get on his nerves. Now that he could see over the fence, he was surprised at how small the animal was; it made an awful lot of threatening noises for something he was pretty sure he could hold in one hand. (Not that he’d want to- they had sharp teeth, didn’t they, and filthy mouths? He liked having hands, thanks.) He tried to convince himself that there were other reasons to dislike the animal other than the… unfortunate parallel to himself. Or, more specifically, to the version of himself that had been stuck in a metal ball.

Not that that mattered anymore, of course. Now he was human, and living with Chell in domestic bliss, and if he’d been inside making dinner instead of trapped on the roof, it would have been a very nice way to end an evening.

The problem, Wheatley thought as he clung to the strange metal thing sticking out between the roof tiles, wasn’t that he was an idiot; the problem was his thinking was… oh, how had Chell put it… non-linear. His ideas didn’t go in straight lines from point A to point B to point C: they _started_ at point C, meandered, said hello to point B going the opposite way, got a bit lost, had a surprising run-in with point R, collided with point K, picked themselves up and brushed themselves off, looped around, took a wrong turn at point T, got lost again, and ended up somewhere between point A and point B, tired and dirty and frustrated and probably missing a shoe.

The other problem was that point C was always such a _good_ idea that he got ahead of himself. He edged towards the gutter, craning his neck to peer over and double-check that it was still too far to drop down, while there was enough light to see the fallen ladder on the patio. It definitely was. He scooted back toward the top of the roof. Point C always glowed like a lighthouse, warm and friendly, a beacon in the darkness. A constant at which to aim. Things started going wrong, though, when you forgot what lighthouses were for, and set out straight for it, straight through miles of mire and weeds.

This situation, for instance. The idea was a good one, a really good one: put up the Christmas lights so Chell didn’t have to. She always seemed to stay at work later in the winter (though maybe that was just because the sun set faster) and all their neighbors already had their lights up. He’d gotten better at keeping the house neat, and was getting along just smashingly at making dinner now they had the crock pot. All right, so right now it was mostly soups, but we all start somewhere, don’t we? And soups were good in the winter. Hot, filling, and there was just something he found so homey in pouring them mugs of it so they could sit in the living room and watch something on the telly. It was… what had that woman called it… _soul_ food. Or had that been about the casserole? (“Foolproof” indeed.)

Anyway, the inside of the house was all decorated: fairy lights along the top of the cupboards, a wreath on the door, and the tree! Oh, the tree smelled _heavenly_ and was simply _covered_ in ornaments, mostly red and gold ones that really contrasted with the green. There was a sparkling gold garland wrapped around and around, weaving between the branches, and a strand of red and green beads that had been a gift from… somebody. Wheatley couldn’t remember the name. There was a gold star at the top, and more fairy lights woven through with the garland, and a red skirt around the bottom, to hide the ugly tree stand. It was lovely, magical almost, and more than worth the hour it had taken to decorate, the poking needles, and the sap that had persisted for much longer than it had any right to- what was the point of the many different kinds of soap Chell had bought if not _one_ got rid of the stickiness? He hated being sticky.

The outdoor decorating was much less involved: throw the net of lights over the small green bushes, wind a string of them through the branches of the lilac, make sure they were all plugged in and that the cord was where no one would trip over it, and that was it. Except for the house lights. Chell had promised they’d put up the icicle lights along the gutter, but it was always so dark when she got home, and she was always tired, so he’d portioned out soup and hadn’t said a thing about it all week. “Maybe Saturday,” she’d said on Thursday, but then on Friday she came home and said they needed her in on Saturday. Not a whole day, only half, and she’d get paid extra. He didn’t want to make a fuss, so he promised to make sure to have dinner ready on time, and hinted that there might be fresh bread, too, which made her smile. He loved to make her smile, but oh, how he _hated_ how tired that smile was.

He hated being stuck, too. It had been warm earlier, making what little snow had fallen threaten to all melt away, making everything outside look rather ugly and muddy, and that was what had given him the idea in the first place: put up the lights while she’s at work, so when she comes home, there they are, bright and cheerful. He’d thought at the time, _with how warm it’s been today, maybe the roof will be clear!_ The roof had been clear, but not dry, and all it had taken was one moment of distraction due to dizziness (funny how, from the ground, it didn’t look that high, and yet once he was at the top of the ladder it had seemed like miles), one slip on the top rung, and as he scrambled up onto the roof the ladder fell down onto the patio with a crash. Now, the sun was setting, and the wind had picked up. It wasn’t quite cutting through his coat (he hadn’t been so silly as to not wear a coat- warm out or no, it _was_ winter), but his bum was going numb on the cold tiles and the dark was making him nervous.

It hadn’t been bad at first. After he’d sat for a minute with his head between his knees, breathing deeply and steadily the way Chell had taught him (in through the nose, count three, out through the mouth), the dizziness had passed. Then he’d had a bit to enjoy the view- the other rooftops, the curved tops of the empty trees black against the clear blue sky, the sun shining down bright and surprisingly warm on his face. Once the initial panic had worn itself out, he’d decided that while he was up here, he might as well hang the lights, and that distracted him for quite a while. Thankfully, he’d brought up enough clips in his coat pocket, and didn’t drop them over the side, or break them, though it did take him a few tries to understand the diagram. (It was not what _he’d_ call a good diagram.) He’d finished just as the few clouds that had appeared were turning gold and pink as the edge of the sky went orange. Now the edge was a dull navy, and the stars were coming out. The neighborhood dog started barking yet again.

Bloody fantastic, he thought broodily. Oh, yes, well done, Wheatley: the lights are up, and you discovered the plug was on the wrong end when you were only halfway through the second string, well done indeed. The bread dough’s probably out of the bowl and all over the counter by now and the soup’s probably burnt to the bottom of the crock pot beyond even Chell’s ability to clean it off. And it was a good soup, too: a nice, thick, creamy tomato. His stomach growled: he hadn’t eaten since midmorning, unless you counted the spoonfuls of soup he’d had when adding ingredients. (How were you supposed to know if it was basil or oregano you needed more of? He could never tell.) He’d put up the lights, but without the extension cord (still coiled on the patio’s top step), he couldn’t even have them lit for her. Would she even be able to see them, without the other outside lights on?

As if on cue, the other outside lights turned on: they were on a timer, he remembered. The colorful glow from the front yard mocked him. Halfway there, they seemed to say, but you forgot about the middle. Again. Idiot. You charged ahead, eyes on the lighthouse, climbing right over the fence that said Warning: Nearly-Impenetrable Bog. Keep Out. He should have thought it all through, reminded himself that one of the things that came with a human body was a sense of balance that sometimes went a bit wonky, and that falling out of bed at the wrong angle might have him walking funny for a week, let alone off a roof, so a sense of nervousness at the foot of a ladder might, in fact, be a sign of sensibility rather than cowardice, and therefore heeded. He should have stayed in the house, made soup, and baked bread. These grand gestures weren’t necessary, and generally more trouble than he budgeted for.

The problem, he thought as he flipped up the hood of the coat, was that he had a very flexible mind and a very thick skull: ideas tended to bounce around inside it, not actually recognizable as bad ideas until they’d gotten a bit bruised and bent out of shape; only then could you see what was underneath the flaking paint.

Wheatley’s pity party was in full swing by the time the front yard was illuminated by headlights. Chell got out of the car, closed the door, locked it, and he could just about follow her thoughts as she looked up, and then up a bit more, and then made him out on the roof, lit faintly by the streetlights and fairy lights. Her mouth formed an O, matching her widening eyes. He waved, trying to smile at her. “I’ll explain it all in a minute, love- if you wouldn’t mind checking the kitchen isn’t on fire?” That was, perhaps, the wrong thing to say- she dashed into the house. And this had all been about letting Chell relax. He sighed.

Next minute the back door flew open and Chell was righting the ladder. “Are you all right? How long have you been up there?”

“Ah- not long,” he lied, slowly scooting down the roof. Why he bothered lying, he didn’t know: one raise of those eyebrows, one pointed question, and before he knew it he was confessing things he hadn’t even realized were lies. “That is,” he said, getting started without even those encouragements, “it’s been- a bit. A long bit. Not as long as- well- maybe an hour after you left?” He could see the top of the ladder. The transition between roof and ladder was always the tricky part. He disliked it intensely.

“An _hour?_ ” Chell did not, he noticed, ask what he was doing, or what he thought he was doing. That was nice. He had learned very quickly that when she asked that question, there was usually no right answer. “You’ve been up there for three hours?”

“It wasn’t so bad,” he said, trying to sound like it wasn’t. It hadn’t been, though. Had it? And where was that top rung? Ugh, this was the worst. “A bit nippy, maybe, but I’ve got the icicles up, and you can see all the housetops-” Aha, there it was. Once you had the first, it was smooth sailing, especially when someone else was steadying the ladder. “And the treetops, and the sunset was _lovely._ ” The sides of the ladder were very cold. He remembered seeing in some movie some action hero sliding down the sides of a ladder. He always wondered how it was done. Didn’t it hurt their hands? “The, er, soup is a lost cause, I suppose.”

“I didn’t check.”

Solid ground at last! Now the only thing was to face the disappointment, the only thing worse than the tricky bit at the top of the ladder. He steeled himself internally (another pointless thing he really needed to stop bothering to do) and turned to her, trying for an apologetic smile and making steadfast eye contact with her forehead. “I’m sorry, love, I know you said to stay off the roof after that business with the cat, but I wanted-”

“Wheatley.”

He cringed, all the steel slithering out of his spine and into the pit of his stomach like a melting spring. “No, I am,” he protested, his steadfast eye contact dropping to her right shoulder as his own shoulders bowed inwards. “I _am_ sorry. I wanted to have the lights up for when you got home, so you didn’t have to bother with it. I wanted to surprise you.”

“Well, you certainly did that,” Chell said, voice both softer and warmer than he’d been expecting. He dared to look a little higher. In the indirect light from the kitchen window, she seemed to be fighting a smile. “A little differently than you were intending, I hope.”

“It’s the top of the ladder,” he said. The words wanted to be both defensive and a complaint; he wrestled them into something that had shadows of both but was mostly the latter. “And the roof’s a little higher than I remembered.”

“That’s been my experience,” Chell said. “Shall we see if the soup’s salvageable? I glanced in the kitchen on the way out and the bread’s made a break for it, I’m afraid.” She took his hand and swung it gently, then stopped with a grimace before he could respond. “Oh, for goodness’ sake. All that work and I was just going to go inside without plugging them in. Where’s that extension cord?”

It should have been a moment’s work to uncoil the cord and plug the one end into the lights and the other end into the timer in the outside outlet. It took several minutes, because the apparent neatness of the coil was an illusion (it was always an illusion, in his experience), and they ended up having to untangle the whole thing before matching the right ends. He plugged the extension cord into the icicles and said, “There you are, love, go for it!”

She bent, paused, then straightened. “No, you do it, but hang on. Let me get to the front and close my eyes.” Again, before he could say anything, she pressed the cord into his hand and once again darted through the house.

My God, he thought, I love her. I wonder where you get mistletoe.

“I’m ready,” she called. It echoed through the neighborhood, setting the neighbor’s dog off yet again.

Maybe the path doesn’t matter as much, Wheatley thought, so long as you get there eventually. At any rate, this is a pretty good ending for three hours on a rooftop feeling like an idiot. He sent up a tiny prayer for a minor Christmas miracle and plugged in the cord. Immediately the backyard was bathed in a blue-white glow that nestled in the center of his chest. He cut through the house, too, to check on the ones in the front yard. (The bread dough was, indeed, making a break for it, oozing over the sides of the bowl and towards the counter. Oh well.)

They were lit, and they clearly illuminated Chell standing on the sidewalk, looking up at their house with the fierce joy he recognized from the day they’d decided to get it (or, more to the point, _she’d_ decided they’d get it and he, being in a rare sensible mood, had agreed without question). And there it was, he thought as the glow deepened, because he’d put up the icicles for her. Then the smile was directed at him, in particular, and several internal organs turned to jelly. Could you serve jelly hot? He joined her on the sidewalk, where she linked their arms before clasping his hand and pulling it into her pocket. Her little fingers were quite warm as they entwined his own. “They’re beautiful,” she said, resting her head against his shoulder. “Thank you for putting them up for me.”

He hemmed for a moment, wanting to clarify that he knew he shouldn’t’ve been up there alone, and promise not to do it in future (which, since he’d gotten stuck on the roof twice now, might actually be a promise he could keep), and maybe apologize once more for good measure, but they’d had a talk about this too, so instead he rested his cheek on her head and said, “You’re welcome.”

They stood on the sidewalk for a long moment, exhaling white clouds, and then Chell shivered. “Let’s get inside and see if the soup’s okay.”

“Okay.”

“I love you, you know.”

The jelly that was his internal organs wobbled. “I love you, too.”

“Even when you do silly, dangerous things,” Chell added, fondly, with a mischievous glint in her eye.

This was teasing. At first, he hadn’t quite understood it, and would jump to his own defense. Now, he just exaggerated a pout. “I said I was sorry.”

She pulled him down to kiss his cheek, which made the pout vanish like their breath in the cold air. “I know.”


End file.
